But you can make it behave as you put it on your head, so it is not bad.  I am pleased with the graphic look of the hat.  I realize it is my usual shape.  I have been thinking a lot about why that is, and I have come up with two reasons.   Number one, hats need to sit on a head and stay there, so a functional hat has to conform to certain restrictions.  I believe absolutely in function over form, and I always have as a craftsperson.  We used to talk about this perennial debate in pottery school and I was always four square for function.

The second reason is that I am fascinated by the process of getting rid of the stitches.   I mentioned a long time ago I learned much of what I know about knitting hats from the hat book (Hats On! by Charlene Schurch I worked my way through a decade or so ago  Lots of friends and family own hats designed by her, because I made way too many of them to keep for my small family.  Alan still wears one of them every day of the winter, and has never replaced it by one of my design.  One line in the book bothered me and it was when she was trying to get rid of a heavily patterned set of stitches and she got rid of them all in a couple of rows by doing k2tog so she didn’t loose the pattern effect, then put a pompom on top. I felt at the time this was a cop out.   As I knit a pattern, I am constantly trying to figure out how to get rid of the stitches in a (hopefully) elegant manner.  Iff that is not possible, then I put a decorative element on the top.  I find I am putting decorative elements on top less and less.  Usually if I  put them on now it is because of other design considerations, like the fact that squiggly bits on the top are fun to make and look at, rather than hiding something.

The stitch is Clouds and Mountains, pg 68.  I did 15 repeats of the 8 stitch pattern, which covers 8 rows. I did a k2tog through back loops, k2 ,k2tog on the dark parts every 5th repeats, did one row plain following the pattern then k2togtbl, k2tog above the previous repeats.  I did this twice more so I had got rid of the entire repeat.  I did this 5 times on top of each other until I had used up all the stitches.